Research Interests

Individual Research Interests

blogs.ubc.ca/monalee/

Bio

I am a professor in the Department of Educational Studies (EDST), specializing in the history of children and youth and the history of education. I teach and conduct research in various areas, including age and size as categories of historical analysis, gender and sexuality, health and the body, race and nation, research methods in education, and schooling and the family.

Along with Penney Clark, I am co-editor of Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation.

I’ve supervised and co-supervised graduate students in a wide-range of topics: decolonizing education, the privatization and marginalization of Muslim women’s bodies post 911, autobiographical approaches to the history of family, and schooling, mothering and language learning, Indigenous priorities in schooling, gender culture in kindergarten, sexuality and HIV prevention education in the context of South Africa, and educational leadership as a key concept in Early Childhood Education.

My contributions to the Department of Educational Studies have included both major service and administrative roles. I’ve acted as Deputy Head, co-ordinator of the Society, Culture and Politics in Education (SCPE) concentration, served as departmental Graduate Advisor (2013-2014), and as Chair of the Master of Arts Committee. I am also engaged in major service roles for the Faculty (Faculty Personnel Committee) and the University (UBC Press Publications Board).

Contributions to the History of Children and Youth/History of Education

My research has focused on children’s varied experiences with social inequality, shaped by race, class, gender, size, and age, and the role that educational and medical professionals have played both in deepening and mitigating inequality. The responses of young people and their families to these interventions are centrally important in my work. I am the author of two books, co-editor of five books, and author of numerous book chapters on topics foregrounding the history of children and education in multiple contexts. My publications appear in the History of Education Quarterly, the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of Family History, the Journal of Canadian Studies, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. With Veronica Strong-Boag, I’ve contributed to the multi-volume Cultural History of Childhood and the Family. Along with co-author Tamara Myers, I’ve contributed a 30-page entry on the “History of Childhood in Canada” to the Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies.

In April of 2015, I was very pleased to be a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA) – Child Studies at the University of Linköping, in Linköping, Sweden.

I’ve received a number of awards for my scholarship and, along with Tamara Myers, co-founded the History of Children and Youth Group of the Canadian Historical Association. I am past Vice President of the Canadian History of Education Association and currently President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (http://shcyhome.org/), the major professional association for scholars in the field.

My keynote addresses include: Canadian History of Education Association (“Beyond Disciplined Thinking: Interdisciplinarity and the Promise of History of Education,” University of Calgary, October 21, 2004) and the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge (“Mapping the Landscape of Childhood,” University of Lethbridge, May 5, 2011). In August of 2016, I’ll address the International Standing Committee on the History of Education (ISCHE) in Chicago with a keynote talk entitled, “Materiality, Metaphor, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education.”

Current Research and Writing

My current research project, funded by a Spencer Foundation Grant, focuses on the schooling experiences of children in rural British Columbia in the early decades of the twentieth century. The research explores a valuable collection of letters written by parents and children to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) over these decades. I’ve worked with EDST PhD student, Claudia Diaz, on a related project that examined how children related to the natural environment in BC in the past. Along with Tamara Myers, I’ve most recently co-edited a collection of essays highlighting cutting edge research in the history of children and youth in Canada that we hope will be a valuable research and teaching resource. That collection, entitled Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make, will appear in 2016 from Oxford University Press.

Research and Scholarly Awards

Outstanding Article Award, Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2001-2002

Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris, and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds., Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (Vancouver: University of Vancouver Press, 2009).

Gleason, M. “The History of Psychology and the History of Education: What Can Interdisciplinary Research Offer?” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 9, 1 (Spring 1997): 98-106.

Gleason, M. “Psychology and the Construction of the ‘Normal’ Family in Postwar Canada, 1945-1960,” Canadian Historical Review 78, 3 (September, 1997): 442-477.

Mona Gleason, “Navigating the Pedagogy of Failure: Medicine, Education and the Disabled Child in English Canada, 1900 to 1945,” in Graham Allan and Nathanel Lauster, eds., The End of Children? Changing Trends in Childbearing and Childhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), pp. 140-160

Mona Gleason and Veronica Strong-Boag, “Community,” in Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, Volume 6, In the Modern Age (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2010): 39-57.

Mona Gleason, “Lost Voices, Lost Bodies?: Doctors and the Embodiment of Children and Youth in English Canada from 1900 to 1940” in Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris, and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds., Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (Vancouver: University of Vancouver Press, 2009).

Mona Gleason, “Size Matters: Medical Experts, Educators, and the Provision of Health Services to Children in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century English Canada” in Cynthia Comacchio, Janet Golden, and George Weisz, eds., Healing the World’s Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century, (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Andreé Gacoin, Teaching empowerment?: Exploring the social relationships of teaching and learning about gender in the context of sexuality education for HIV prevention in South Africa. (Co-supervision with L. Loutzenheiser)

EdD Dissertation

Iris Berger, Narration as Action: The Potential of Pedagogical Narration for Leadership Enactment in Early Childhood Education Contexts (2013)